cuttings from pines for transplant????

[Tom]

Cutting has taken on a new meaning lately with children and some adults, slicing themselves up with razor blades and knives to satisfy some psychological problems.

Plant cuttings are what most of us are familiar with.  It's a leaf, twig or small limb removed from a plant and nurtured, either in the ground or some rooting medium, until it develops roots and can be planted with the chances being good that it will be self-sustainable.

Usually we think of cuttings being taken from flowers, like Roses.   It is a means of vegetatively propagating a plant to produce fruit or flowers true to the original plant.

Conifers don't generally propagate like this very well.  It even takes a very technical individual and a lot of luck to propagate conifers through grafting.  Most cuttings of pines that I'm familiar with usually end up being called fence posts.

[SwampDonkey]

Black spruce layers naturally in the wild and has been rooted from cuttings by the ...well too many to count. 

Northern white cedar (eastern white cedar) also layers if a tree gets wind blown or a limb, in an area devoid of deer, touches the soil for some time. I have not seen many layered cedar. I have seen a lot of layers spruce especially on dry sandy sites that were devastated by fires and covered in caribou moss. You get the mother tree in the middle and a ring of small trees growing around it. I have also seen white spruce grafted as well as balsam fir. Most all the white spruce grafts I've seen turn into a limb crawling across the ground. This habit seems to depend on the location in the crown the cutting was taken. I had an albino white spruce that was from a rooted cutting. It would flush almost white and gradually turn green over the growing season. The lawn mower and it had a battle and the mower won. 

[tonich]

Norway Spruce layerings is the only possible way of regeneration at the upper forest line in my region.

This is all layerings, my dear!